This article is part of Football FanCast’s Pundit View series, which provides opinion and analysis on recent quotes from journalists, pundits, players and managers…
Speaking to iNews, former Arsenal ace Stephan Lichtsteiner has suggested Unai Emery struggled to deal with the club’s top players.
What did he say?
The Spaniard was sacked as the manager of the Gunners last week, after going on a dismal run of no wins in seven games across all competitions.
And whilst performances on-the-pitch were certainly not up to standards, Emery’s handling of key issues involving players like Mesut Ozil and Granit Xhaka for example certainly came under scrutiny.
The former PSG boss appeared to ostracise Ozil from the match-day squad last season, before bringing him back into the first-team fold towards the latter half of the campaign. And following Xhaka’s infamous incident with the Emirates faithful in the game against Crystal Palace, Emery decided to publicly declare that the Switzerland international was in the wrong.
And now, Lichtsteiner has suggested that whilst his general reign was “positive”, he did have an issue with being able to handle the club’s star players.
He said: “I’d say (he is) a good trainer, a good coach, but maybe he struggled with the top players. With the big players, he hasn’t maybe the relationship to bring more out (of them) and get the top performances.
“Maybe that point I can say (something) negative, but the rest was almost everything positive. Over a long time it was really good, then the last two months (of the season) I didn’t really understand what had happened. The training was good, the team that we had last year was an amazing team, so it’s not my thing to speak badly about the coach because it is too easy now to say something against him.”
Man-management
Whilst Lichtsteiner perhaps rather surprisingly was effusive in his praise of Emery, his damning verdict on the Spaniard’s ability to handle the top players at the Emirates speaks volumes of the struggles the former Gunners manager encountered at the club.
He had a similar issue at PSG with trying to deal with Neymar, and it appears he didn’t learn from that experience sufficiently to handle Ozil in particular. Whilst his sentiment in wanting to leave the German out from his team because of his off-the-ball work is understandable, doing so at a time when the Gunners desperately needed results and goals was frustratingly stubborn.
In the end, he gave in, and Ozil won, with the play-maker featuring prominently in Emery’s final few games in charge. Whilst Lichtsteiner’s point was hardly the biggest reason behind his departure, it certainly tallied up to make his life at Arsenal even more difficult than it already was.
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